Bob's Supers Playtest Con 1 - PowerGame

[Bob McNamee]

Bob’s Playtest Con

I have been looking into running a Supers related game…but not using Champions (which we used in the past).  I created the same characters for each of 4 games Powergame, Paladin, SuperKind (my OtherKind variant), and the Pool..  

I decided to go pretty 4-color with the tone… Bill played Captain Wonder “The Greatest thing since Sliced Bread”, and Chris picked Doughboy “The Boy Wonder”.

POWERGAME

“Ice Pirates”
about 1.5 hours

Bill, Chris, and I played the freeware POWERGAME first.  A simulationist RPG that seemed the closest to Champions, but a different combat style… they went through an typical investigation of jewelry store heists using only role-playing no mechanics… this led to the stakeout of the next store to be hit…
Combat POWERGAME-style…
Pwergames powers and stats are based on powerlevels 0 – 8 that indicate how many dice d6 you roll

PG uses multiple rolls of d6’s
Combat consists of
Roll initiative based on speed related ability for all… go in order of highest…
Roll to hit (Power or STR) vs Dodge roll (based on Agility or appropriate Movement Power) of opponent
Roll Damage of Power  vs.  Toughness (or an armor-like power)…

Sounds slow…but it didn’t turn out that way….

Criticals were fun!
PG uses critical successes on rolls where you get double your opponent. This turned out to be quite fun for the players (they were rolling well). On initiative - a critical allows two moves. On a roll to hit- a crit allows to bypass partial armor, or reduce armor/toughness by 1 power level (1 d6) for damage. A critical Damage reduces toughness fast and causes bad injuries (left to description of GMs/players). A critical roll in favor of the Dodger on a hit roll allows an immediate counter attack.

The heros attacked Four mook Penalty Boxers… they went through them fast in a very heroic fashion… mook attack dodge criticals allowed the heros to “duck under his highstick, and punch him in the stomach…”. The arrival of their SuperVillain employers Hack and Slash, was a more even, longer fight, but still quite quick compared to Champions…

Bill’s comment was “This really felt like a comic book fight…”

Everyone had fun… it might have been different if the critical rolls had gone the other way though…
Heros do have Luck points to spent to get rerolls… in this game they will need them…

My opinion: fun mechanics for fighting…players gave good four color descriptions